9 Festival Marketing
by Jennie Jordan and Kristy Diaz
After reading this chapter you should:
Have an overview of the principles of festival marketing
Understand the motivations and processes involved in deciding to participate in a festival
Understand and be able to apply marketing tools including segmentation and targeting,
branding, customer relationship management, the marketing mix and marketing research
Understand the strategic role of marketing within a festival organisation
Introduction
Marketing, promotion, sales, communications, audiences, participation – the
concepts covered in this section are a fundamental part of festival manage-
ment, whether your event is a community fête or a globally recognised music
festival. The word ‘marketing’ originated from the simple forms of buying
and selling that can be seen in a local street market, but the term now encom-
passes a range of sophisticated techniques that have developed to help com-
panies decide what products and services to produce and how to persuade
people to buy them. This chapter introduces marketing concepts and illus-
trates how festivals and cultural events can adapt the techniques to develop
appropriate experiences for festival-goers, artists and communities.
This chapter will introduce concepts such as supply and demand, segmen-
tation and targeting, CRM (customer relationship management), experience
marketing and its relationship to service design, and branding. It will raise
questions about the extent to which a festival’s artistic programme can or
should be led by market demand, whether the relationship between artists
and festival-goers is more complex than those expected in traditional mar-
keting models and about the ethics of storing and using data collected on
festival-goers’ behaviours and preferences.
